Student Question
How do writers use nature to establish themes in their works?
Quick answer:
Writers use nature to establish themes by reflecting philosophical movements and contrasting human experiences. Romanticists like Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth use nature to express the sublime and spiritual elevation, while Transcendentalists such as Emerson see nature as a reflection of the Divine. Conversely, Dark Romantics like Poe and Melville depict nature as a dark force. Naturalists like Jack London and Stephen Crane portray nature as indifferent, highlighting human vulnerability. Nature often symbolizes freedom or life's struggles, as seen in Twain's and Hemingway's works.
To add to the ample explication provided above, certain authors have incorporated Nature into their works as key elements of the particular literary movement and philosophy to which they adhere. For example, in Frankenstein, the Romanticist Mary Shelley includes particular passages describing the magnificent Mount Blanc of France in the Alps, as well as other natural phenomenon and beauty such as the lakes, areas in which Victor Frankenstein finds solace from his troubling psyche and soul, even experiencing the sublime. The natural world is, of course, the antithesis of the corruption of nature created in the scientific world, Victor's creature.
That nature provides an elevated state of the spirit is no more beautifully portrayed than in William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" in which the poet returns to a place visited as a youth where he experiences this "sublime": The mind loses consciousness and the...
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spirit is able to experience beyond rational thought, and the burden of the worldly is lifted as the spirit connects with Nature:
....And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
Likewise, the Transcendentalists felt joy and union with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson felt that everything in the world is a reflection of the Divine Soul, and the physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual world. God's spirit is revealed in nature. Emerson writes in Nature:
In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says--he is my creature, and augre [in spite of] all his impertinent grief, he shall be glad with me.
On the other hand, the Dark Romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe as Herman Melville perceived Nature as a formidable force, if not reflective of the dark side of man. In Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the crumbling house and decay of the natural growth outside parallels the decay of the Usher family. In his magnum opus Melville's Ahab perceives Nature in the great white whale as some inscrutable metaphysical force:
All visible objects...are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!
Jack London, previously alluded to, a follower of Naturalism, as was Stephen Crane, write, not of a Nature that sympathetic to man's inner being and an inspiration, but rather an indifferent, if not at times hostile, universe in which man is at its mercy. The unnamed man in "To Build a Fire" is ill-equipped to deal with the merciless Yukon. Similarly, the shipwrecked men in "The Open Boat" are at the mercy of an uncaring universe,
A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping the boat.
The theme of the absurdity of man's attempt to formulate an interpretation of Nature is certainly in this story in which God is absent from Nature and it is unromantic and uncaring is exemplified in the resolution when the best swimmer and sailor in the boat washes up on shore after having drowned. For the Naturalists, Nature is lacking in sentiment.
In addition to Nature as thematic of itself, it is often used as symbol. Mark Twain's river of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is certainly symbolic of a setting in which man can be free of the restrictions imposed by society. For, on the raft, Huck and Jim can be friends, whereas in society, they must be slave and master and even hide lest Jim be caught and punished for escaping.
Sometimes Nature symbolizes life itself, as it does in Hemingway's novella, The Old Man and the Sea in which all is stripped away from the narrative but the human struggle to survive, and above all, to dream.